Avery Island Road Trip

Our latest adventure takes us to Avery Island, the home of world-famous TABASCO Sauce.

Avery Island lies about 140 miles west of New Orleans. It's one of five salt dome islands rising above the flat Louisiana Gulf coast. Geologists believe these mysterious elevations were created when a saltwater ocean covering what is now Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi evaporated—leaving behind a vast sheet of salt.

Today, these five coastal islands sit above and are surrounded by the swamps and marshes of south Louisiana. Avery Island stands the highest at 163 feet above mean sea level.

























Under the Avery/McIlhenny family's careful management, Avery Island has remained a natural paradise, inhabited by exotic plant and animal species from throughout the world. The wildlife population expands each spring when thousands of snowy white egrets and other migratory water birds return to Bird City. This vast, protected rookery owes its existence to Edward Avery McIlhenny, second son of Edmund McIlhenny who invented TABASCO® Sauce.